Sector Blue Quiet

Sector Blue Quiet occupies the far rim of a cold, flat moon, which is itself the kind of place a man ends up rather than chooses, and the sky runs cobalt from one week to the next without the common decency to change. The district was, at one time, a waypoint. Then the interstellar Relay fractured, as grand infrastructure tends to do when nobody is watching it closely enough, and Blue Quiet became a waiting room instead. Ships still arrive, which I suppose passes for optimism in these parts. They simply arrive when they feel like it. The consequence is that every launch window is treated with the reverence of a religious holiday, and every missed one produces the kind of silence you find in houses where the food has run short. The people here have made their peace with this, after a fashion. They keep their machinery legible—big riveted housings, conduits you can follow with a bare finger, bays numbered on the assumption that a man’s memory cannot be trusted in a crisis, which is a fair assumption regarding men generally. Three places pass for civilization. The Dead Reckoning, where survey crews scratch out ice routes and radio shadows with the gravity of men who believe cartography is the last honest profession. The Hotbox, a sealed greenhouse where plants grow under artificial light as if daring the moon to object. And the Checkpoint Arches, administered by the Guild, which is to say administered by paperwork and the slow, institutional suspicion that everybody wants something they haven’t properly applied for. Outside is blue and cold and vast and largely indifferent to the proceedings. Inside is amber and loud and warm and smells of machine oil and something growing. Most people, given the choice, prefer inside. I cannot say I blame them.